The Road to
Peace - Peace by Federation
The Bosnian experiment and its lessons for Sri Lanka
19 July 2003
 1.
A concerted effort is being made by all three parties to the
Ceasefire Agreement to find a federal solution to the Sri Lankan
conflict. None of them has any first hand experience of federal
government and the GOSL has to contend with a visceral antipathy to
the federal form as a possible precursor to separation. The federal
states under study now are long established federations such as
Switzerland, Belgium, and Canada etc in which federation was not
between parties, which had been recently at war with each other. It
is in Bosnia-Herzegovina, a former unitary state that an attempt has
been made to secure peace between three warring parties - Serbs,
Muslims and Croats - by recourse to a federal form.
2. There are very few commonalities between the Bosnian conflict and
that in Sri Lanka. In Bosnia there is no ethnic difference; all
three parties are Southern Slavs. They all speak the same language,
Serbo-Croat. It is written in different scripts - Roman letters
among the Croats and Muslims and Cyrillic letters by the Serbs.
However, this difference too is mitigated by the teaching of both
scripts in all schools, the publication of newspapers in both
scripts and the familiarity of all persons with both scripts. In
these respects the Bosnian situation is fundamentally different to
that in Sri Lanka.
Religious difference (Bosnia) vs. ethnic nationalism (Sri Lanka)
3. In Bosnia the nationalism of the three parties is founded on
religious differences - the Roman Catholicism of the Croats, the
Orthodox Christianity of the Serbs and Islam among the Muslims. In
Sri Lanka religion is only the handmaiden of ethnic nationalism. The
two situations are fundamentally different.
4. Territorially too there is a big difference. All three Bosnian
nations have scattered enclaves in each others areas of majority
domicile. There is no compact block of any one nation. Even the
mainly Muslim capital city of Sarajevo has a Serb enclave in the
north-east. In Sri Lanka the Tamil people claim the north-east
province as their area of traditional habitation while acknowledging
the presence of other ethnic groups within it. The three Bosnian
nations do not have an ethno-territorial foundation in a compact
land mass as claimed by the Tamil people in Sri Lanka.
5. The war among the Bosnian nations lasted for a much shorter
duration than that in Sri Lanka - three and a half years from April
1992 to November 1995 in Bosnia as against eighteen and a half years
in Sri Lanka from July 1983 to December 2001. Despite the short
duration the Bosnian war gave rise to a very big efflux of refugees
- one and a half million persons as against half that number from
Sri Lanka during a much longer period. The refugee crisis projected
by the Bosnian war had therefore, a much sharper international focus
than the war in Sri Lanka even though the refugee flows were in the
same direction i.e. westwards into the liberal democracies which
opened their doors to them.
US mediation ended war 6. The war in Bosnia was ended
in 1995 by United States mediation, first by the Washington
agreement which ended the Croat- Muslim conflict by the creation of
the Bosnia-Herzegovina Federation and finally by the Dayton Accords
which recognized the Republika Srepska of the Bosnian Serbs and set
up the federal state of Bosnia-Herzegovina. replacing the former
unitary state. The new state does not have the formal designation of
"Federation" but it is one in fact with two constituent "entities" ,
namely , the Bosnia-Herzegovina Federation of the Croats and Muslims
on the one hand and the Republika Srepska of the Bosnian Serbs on
the other.
7. The constitutional order is complex with each body having a
bicameral legislature. The overarching body, Bosnia-Herzegovina has
a bi-cameral Parliamentary Assembly with an House of Representatives
elected by popular franchise and an House of People elected by
ethnic constituencies. The two "entities" which constitute
Bosnia-Herzegovina each has bi-cameral legislatures and it is with
these legislatures that effective power lies. The centre has a
rotating Presidency with Vice-Presidents from the nations other than
that of the President at any time. There is an agreement to have
each of the nations equally represented in government employment
from the lowest to the highest echelons
Stabilisation compels compliance 8. The Dayton
Accords of November 1995 recognized that their implementation could
not be left to voluntary compliance by the three nations due to
their recent history of war and mutual animosity. So they provided
for international supervision of compliance backed by a
Stabilisation Force of international composition. There was to be an
High Representative of the International Community drawn from an
European country and a Deputy drawn from the USA, both to be
resident in Bosnia Herzegovina. At present the High Representative
is Lord Ashdown from the U.K. and the Deputy is Donald Hayes from
the USA. Lord Ashdown reports to a PEACE IMPLEMENTATION COUNCIL in
Brussels composed of representatives of six major nations
-USA,UK,FRANCE, ITALY,GERMANY and RUSSIA.
9. The High Representative has responsibility for implementation of
the Dayton Accords in the civilian spheres of Refugee Return and
Rehabilitation, Human Rights and the Protection of Minorities and in
these areas his decisions override those of the "entities" or the
centre which run counter to his decisions.
10. Also in the civilian area there is a Constitutional Court
composed of nine judges - two from each of the three nations and
three from the Peace Implementation Council.
11. The High Representative is backed in enforcing compliance with
the Dayton Accords by the Stabilisation Force -SFOR- composed of
troops from the USA, NATO and several other European countries such
as Russia, Bulgaria, Albania etc. Its forces are stationed in three
sectors into which the country has been divided - the north-east in
which the forces are under US command; the south-east commanded by
France and the rest under UK command. SFOR is under the overrall
command of the High Representative and currently numbers around
15,000 troops. ( At the beginning in 1995 there were 60,000 troops.)
12. SFOR has several military responsibilities, among them the
disarming of armed cadres in the border areas within the several
enclaves of the different "entities", the storing of surrendered
weapons, the regulating of military maneouvres by the armed forces
of the ""entities" and the fostering of cooperation between them by
joint exercises etc.
13. The Dayton Accords do not prescribe any time limit for the
presence of the High Representative or SFOR thus implying that their
duration will depend on the degree and quality of compliance with
the principles of the Accords as well as scrupulous observance of
their letter.
14. Each of the "entities", namely the Croat-Muslim Federation and
the Republika Srepska, has armed forces of its own while the centre,
namely, Bosnia-Herzegovina, has none. The armed forces of the
Croat-Muslim Federation are under separate Croat and Muslim
commands, so in actual fact there are three sets of armed forces
none of which has any significant aerial capability. Since the
country is landlocked there are no naval forces, so the armed forces
are exclusively ground troops. The forces of SFOR are more than
capable of enforcing and maintaining peace between them and have
done so over the last eight years from 1995 to the present.
State on international probation 15. From all this it
is abundantly clear that present day Bosnia-Herzegovina is not an
independent sovereign state. Just three and half years of war has
ended that state and replaced it with a state on international
probation. Compliance with international requirements judged by the
international community as indispensable for the maintenance of
peace is enforced by international troops on the ground and
supervised by a resident High Representative. In all but name it is
an International Protectorate. That has been the price for
preserving territorial integrity and avoiding break-up. And it is
all due to the recognition of the impossibility of disarming the
former warring parties who continue in possession of their arms.
16. In Sri Lanka too any hope of disarming the warring parties is
vain. Neither party can disarm the other. In that respect it is a
Bosnian situation. Just like in Bosnia a federal structure aimed at
preserving the territorial integrity of the state will require
international enforcement with troops on the ground and supervision
by an international representative reporting to an international
body committed to maintaining peace. Sovereign independence is the
price that will have to be paid for peace with but a fig leaf of
territorial integrity.
17. The alternative of total separation into two independent
sovereign states, each a member of the United Nations and thus bound
by the UN Charter's provisions against aggression and securing the
territorial integrity of each state seems to this writer a more
attractive and practicable proposition.
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